Posts categorized "Cinema"

We just got around to viewing this lovely movie (thank you, Amazon Instant Video) and it's a thorough delight. Set in a fictional English retirement home for musicians called Beecham House (modeled on the famous Casa di Riposo per Musicisti in Milan founded by Verdi) it stars Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, Pauline Collins, and Billy Connolly (an actor with whose name and work we're totally unfamiliar but who is so much the spitting image of John Cleese in face, figure, and voice that it was not until the movie's closing credits we learned it was not John Cleese playing the role) all of whom turned in touching performances in this touching little tale which film critic Stanley Kauffmann described in his review for The New Republic as being "a bit thin" (which it is) but then went on to astutely observe that it really "doesn't matter. The important thing was to spend a hundred minutes or so [i.e., the length of the movie] with these people in that place," which people also included a singing cameo role for the great dramatic soprano Dame Gwyneth Jones who played Anne Langley, one of the resident guests of Beecham House. Lots of fine music-making to be heard throughout the movie all of the instrumentalists involved being real-life retired instrumentalists playing resident guests of Beecham House who actually performed the instrumental music seen in the movie themselves.

If you haven't seen this movie it's well worth at least renting from Amazon Instant Video for three bucks (we bought the film from AIV for eight bucks) and some 100 minutes of your time.

Over the decades, we've viewed Citizen Kane some two- or three-dozen times and each time it seems as fresh as our first viewing. We viewed it again last night and it still raises the hair on the back of our neck, even at times brings us to tears so consummate a work of art is it.

How was it possible for a 24-yr-old, filmmaking-ignorant Orson Welles to create such a film — his very first — right out of the box, so to speak? It's akin to, say, Richard Wagner creating a Tristan und Isolde the very first time he put pen to manuscript paper. Impossible, of course. Yet what Welles accomplished in creating Citizen Kane is its rough equivalent for he both shaped and controlled every aspect of the film's making from its scripting to its actual filming and editing.

Clearly, Welles's accomplishment required an authentic cinematic genius — a genius of the most prodigious sort for which no explanation is sufficient or can even be conjectured. Whatever else Welles may have been he was indisputably that and in our estimation is to world cinema what Bach is to music and Mozart to opera.

Courtesy of HDNet Movies and our DVR we viewed Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho last night and were struck, as we are each time we view this film, by how fresh the now 55-year-old film still feels and plays. Although we've never been a fan of Hitchcock's work, Psycho is an anomaly that stands apart from all his other works with which we're familiar which include all his American movies beginning with Rebecca in 1940 for the legendary David O. Selznick. The hallmark of all those movies is their excellence of moviemaking craft in both their technical aspects and storytelling but none of them strikes us as being distinguished cinematically — none of them, that is, except Psycho which, in our estimation, is cinematic to its very core in its every aspect — visually, aurally, and in its storytelling. And a considerable part of what's responsible for making the film so distinguished cinematically is, strange to tell, its astonishing string-orchestra-only music soundtrack with score by the incomparable Bernard Herrmann. Just listening to that full soundtrack from beginning to end conjures up the entire visual film scene-by-scene as if it were playing right before our eyes so evocative and so organically interwoven a part of the fabric of the film is that music.

Are there such composers writing for films today (Herrmann died in 1975)? We don't really know as, with but a very few exceptions, we gave up going to the movies beginning in the late '70s when we walked out disgusted halfway through a showing of the original Star Wars, but we bet not. Herrmann was, from all that's known to us, a sui generis one-off whose like makes an appearance perhaps once a century if that often.

We watched two motion pictures yesterday on a 36" HD Flat Screen TV, one after the other: Vertigo (seen via HDNet Movies), a 1958 Alfred Hitchcock movie, and Day of Wrath (seen via Turner Classic Movies), a 1943 Danish film by Danish director and writer Carl Theodor Dreyer both the film and the filmmaker previously unknown to us. Cinematically, the contrast between the two motion pictures couldn't have been more striking — or telling. The former is a thoroughly ordinary, technically well-made, big-budget, Technicolor Hollywood commercial product of the time. The latter, shot beautifully and evocatively in black-and-white, a genuine intimate-scale masterpiece of the cinematic art. In 2012 the British Film Institute's jury of 846 critics, programmers, academics and distributors in its list of The 50 Greatest Films of All Time voted Vertigo the Greatest Film of All Time ahead of Citizen Kane, no less. Day of Wrath never even made the list.

Prompted by our rereading of Kafka's The Trial (we'd just added it to our Kindle after realizing it was missing from our Kindle library) we downloaded from Amazon Instant Video the 1963 Orson Welles film adaptation of the novel (about which more at a later time on our potpourri blog This & That) and were immediately struck by what might be called the film's theme music: a hauntingly tragic, meltingly beautiful piece of music we recognized instantly but could not, for the life of us, identify; either the piece or its composer although both are well known to us.

A Senior Moment, of course (being old really sucks but preferable to the only other alternative, we suppose). However, we knew the identification of both piece and composer would, as per usual, be given in the film's closing credits (as we typically do, we had let the opening credits roll by without giving them notice) but had to run those closing credits twice before spying the composer's name (but, amazingly, not the name of the piece which is not given anywhere) listed on a lowercase line headed "music:" and after the name of another composer both names listed not on their own "card" as might be expected but included in a list of other same-size credits: Tomaso Albinoni (1671–1751), on spying which name we knew instantly that the piece was none other than his justly famous G-minor Adagio For Strings And Organ. Since hearing that music anew it's refused to let us be and now plays nonstop on what we laughingly call our "sound system" and in our head as well.

Such "earworms", as they're called, are hardly unusual but there's something especially unsettling about this one; especially unsettling because, for starters, we can't quite puzzle out whether it's the hauntingly tragic, meltingly beautiful music itself that's responsible or its Welles-imposed association with and insinuation into Kafka's hauntingly strange, quietly but persistently and relentlessly nightmarish, unbeautiful tragic tale.

In 2005, we wrote the following as the lede graf of an S&F entry commenting on our experience attending a screening of the hit movie Batman Begins titled "ACD Goes To The Movies" (which entry can be read in full here).

In 1977, after two decades of ardent and involved devotion to the cinema, I attended a screening of the original Star Wars movie drawn there against all my best instincts by the phenomena of the huge adult crowds lining up at the box office to see this putative kiddie flick, and by the largely positive reviews from certain film reviewers who ordinarily would dismiss such a movie almost out of hand. An hour or so after it began I left the movie theater mid-show disgusted and angered so simpleminded and cartoonish were the story and dopey dialogue, the high-school-production acting Alec Guinness's performance excepted (what in God's name was Guinness doing in such a movie(!)?), and the special effects which looked as if they were lifted from some video game, and with but two exceptions (Schindler's List, and the showing of a print of the newly restored Lawrence of Arabia), haven't entered a movie theater since as I sensed that this movie and its enthusiastic reception by adults and professional film reviewers marked the beginning of the end for serious cinema in America and the beginning of a blockbuster mentality among filmmakers that's incompatible with the creation of works of cinematic art.

And with the single and singular exception of the aforementioned 2005 experience, so has it remained to this day.

There is today an ancillary experience: We cannot today find so much as a single movie reviewer (forget about critic), online or in print, in whose writings we can place any aesthetic trust, or who writes with the panache, eloquence, grace, and intelligence of film reviewers and critics of days past. Gone are the likes of Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, Bosley Crowther, and John Simon. (Mr. Simon is still alive but no longer regularly reviews movies in print. He does, however, have an online blog — Uncensored John Simon — but which blog is, unhappily, not devoted to reviewing anything.)

Much of the blame for the debased quality of today's critical writing on movies can be laid squarely at the feet of TV's Dynamic Duo, the late Gene Siskel and his late partner in crime Roger Ebert, the modern-day originators of the thumbs-up-thumbs-down school of movie reviewing. One can readily understand the appeal of such reviews both for reviewers and their audiences. They're relatively easy and quick to write, and for their audiences, infinitely easier to assimilate and understand than are the deeper-thought-out, more deeply examined and researched criticism of the best movie reviewers and critics of yesteryear. But that's hardly a justification of the practice. Merely an attempt at a partial explanation, superficial and true though it may be.

Oh!, where have all today's true movie reviewers and critics gone? Are they all hibernating, awaiting a more propitious cultural time to make their reappearance? Or is it the case that the species has simply outlived its appeal and usefulness and consequently gone irretrievably extinct?

The following video is truly a genuine gestalt and pure poetry into the bargain. Its maker titles the video (which you should watch full screen in 720p HD if your machine is capable — and do turn up the sound just a bit) "The Last Thing You See: A Final Shot Montage" (a full list of the movies represented can be had by going to YouTube and clicking on ABOUT) but it's decidedly more than that — much more.

When is a Konzept Regietheater opera production not Eurotrash? Answer: when it's made into an original film by actor/director and since 2012 Knight of the Realm Sir Kenneth Branagh and is not presented as a new staging or "interpretation" of a canonical work but is clearly presented as an original work based on and adapted from a canonical work. Such is Branagh's 2006 film The Magic Flute which is only now having its U.S. release.

Based on a review DVD of the film sent us by the film's distributor Revolver Entertainment, the film is an adaptation based on the Mozart opera (Singspiel) of the same name adapted for the screen and directed by Branagh with new English libretto and dialogue by Stephen Fry and new screenplay by co-writers Branagh and Fry. Mozart's sublime music (no other adjective characterizes it adequately) for his The Magic Flute — all of it — is of course used for this adaptation and used wonderfully well even though it's — how to put it — realized less than wonderfully well by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (not their fault) conducted by James Conlon (his fault) whose tempi left little time or room for Mozartian nuance and left us feeling that Maestro Conlon was running late for some important appointment or other he just had to get to.

Branagh has set his visually beautiful Flute in a war zone that looks suspiciously like (but is not intended to particularly be) World War I — trench warfare, poison gas and all — but that notwithstanding is consistently true to the spirit and sense of Mozart's Flute sans the masonic references and allusions the work proceeding as if it were the playing out of a terrified soldier's fantasy born of a desperate need to escape the real horrors that surround him but in which fantasy he can still emerge a noble and courageous hero. And so he does, and within the work's context it's all delightfully believable.

With the exception of Joseph Kaiser who played the role of Tamino and showed himself to be a stellar Mozartian tenor, the singer-actors in this film adaptation all made fine if not especially notable jobs of it both musically and dramatically, that latter, we suspect, largely a result of the attentions of Sir Kenneth who, by his own admission, may not know much about opera but surely knows his business from top to bottom where the dramatic arts are concerned.

One might feel tempted to compare this film with Ingmar Bergman's brilliant 1975 film of the same name. Resist the temptation. Apples and oranges. Bergman's film is a clear restaging/reimagining of Mozart's opera, not an adaptation simply based on that opera and so a different sort of fruit altogether. But just as Bergman's film left its audiences all smiles and warm good feelings, the Branagh film will do precisely the same. In that, the two films are most eminently comparable indeed.

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 10:19 AM Eastern on 4 May. See below.]

We yesterday viewed for the first time in a decade or so the Coen brothers' film Fargo and the viewing served to confirm for us our previous assessment of the film as one of the most perfectly realized films ever made save for a single, egregious, and inexplicable error of judgment; an error that would require but a single, simple edit to set right.

And the inexplicable error? The out-of-order placement of one of the film's final four scenes.

As released, the film's final four scenes (described below in sharply truncated form) are:

Final Scene 1: It's snowing. Marge discovers the killers' car in front of a cabin. She finds Grimsrud stuffing his buddy-in-crime into a wood chipper, announces her presence, and shoots Grimsrud in the leg as he tries to escape. He falls to the snow-covered ground. Marge, gun in hand and pointed at him, carefully approaches him.

CUT TO...

Final Scene 2: Camera moves fairly slowly down an empty, snow-covered road along which, we discover after a bit, Marge is driving her police cruiser (called a "prowler" in the film). It's still snowing. Then the interior of the prowler, Marge at the wheel. Grimsrud sits in the rear seat which is separated from the front seat by a wire screen, hands cuffed behind him. Behind Marge's prowler another prowler, gumballs spinning, punches through the white of the falling snow. It approaches in slow motion. An ambulance punches through after it. Then another prowler. Marge hears their distant sirens, brings her prowler to a halt and sets its gumballs spinning to await them.

FADE OUT. FADE IN ON...

Final Scene 3: A shabby motel next to a highway on a snowy, windswept plain. The terrified Lundegaard is discovered in the motel by two cops who've been alerted he's on the run and who capture and cuff him while he screams in terror and frustration.

CUT TO...

Final Scene 4: Marge and Norm's bedroom. Both are in bed. Norm tells Marge his design won the competition for the three-cent stamp. Marge tells him how proud she is of him. Norm reaches over to rest a hand on Marge's pregnant belly. "Two more months," says Norm. Marge absently rests her hand on top of his. "Two more months," she says.

FADE OUT. FINIS.

And the out-of-order scene? The above Final Scene 3 of course. It should have been Final Scene 2 and the above Final Scene 2 should have been Final Scene 3.

This is no minor clumsy misstep. It not only jarringly defeats what should be, both logically and dramatically, a seamless transition from Marge's police prowler and the approaching ambulance and other police prowlers to Marge and Norm's bedroom but, worse, much worse, virtually shatters the film's until-then pitch-perfect-ness and prior unbroken perfection of realization at which one cannot help but feel cheated, even robbed, by the filmmakers.*

Perhaps one day the Coen brothers will come to see the matter as we do and correct the error with the simple edit that would be all that would be required to set things right.

Uh-huh.

Not in this life.

* Just between us chickens, we would have ended the film with the transposed Final Scene 3 (what shows above as Final Scene 2) and done away with Final Scene 4 altogether. That transposed Finale Scene 3 is hugely powerful visually, partly because it evocatively echoes the film's opening sequence, and powerful dramatically because Marge's last words in that scene, thoroughly banal as the writers intended them to be ("And [all that killing]. For what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than money, you know. Don't you know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't unnerstand it.") — words addressed as much to herself as to Grimsrud in the rear seat who, blank-faced, unhearing and unmoved, is paying no attention whatsoever — neatly sum up her entire wonderfully implausible character (played to absolute perfection by Frances McDormand) and her equally wonderfully implausible outlook on life and the world.

Update (10:19 AM Eastern on 4 May): Following is the opening sequence of Fargo (best viewed full screen and in 720p HD resolution) with its strangely haunting music by Carter Burwell based on an old Norwegian folk melody. This opening theme is also used over the closing credits and the harmonic skeleton of which is used often throughout the film. Like everything else about the film (the single exception being the subject of this S&F entry), we can't imagine music more perfect.

As it had no choice but to do, the Met is reviving its production of the Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen beginning 6 April 2013 with Das Rheingold and continuing in three complete cycles ending 11 May 2013 with Götterdämmerung. Grin and bear it. After this mandatory revival perhaps we'll be rid of the thing forever.

A member of a venerable online opera forum asked:

The new [Met] Ring, I loved it, in the Met and in HD. The sets were fantastic, and elastic. The singing was very good as well. So why exactly are so many against it?

To which we replied:

Because it ended up being a Robert Lepage spectacular (actually, a spectacular that failed as a spectacular; but that's quite beside the point) with Wagner's music serving as sound track and Wagner's drama given only lip service. Mr. Lepage's focus seemed to be on what he could get Le Machine to do that would result in some visually arresting effect for its own sake at any particular moment rather than on how the capabilities of the contraption could best be exploited to support, express, or frame the drama moment by moment from work's beginning to end. It's a tail-wagging-the-dog approach that's all but guaranteed to result in shallow (at least attempted) coups de théâtre pretty much every time, precisely as it did in this production.

After a repeat viewing of the Met's HD film of the tetralogy (via our HD DVR recordings of the HD PBS telecasts), we saw nothing to alter that opinion. For our comments on each of the music-dramas as telecast, you might want to consult the following S&F entries:

On another online opera forum, a member remarked to us that we ought to be grateful and accept the Lepage staging of the Ring as the lesser of two evils. After all, at least the Lepage staging was not a Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater staging, to which we replied:

While I take your point (and it's a reasonable one), saying we ought to accept the lesser of two evils with some measure of gratitude is hardly an answer to the problem. The Lepage staging of the Ring is in every way unacceptable, especially for a company with the prestige and stature of the Met. And what makes it unacceptable is NOT fixable except by doing away with it altogether as it's flawed conceptually. The Lepage staging centrally features Le Machine as the looming, hulking, impotently conspicuous star of the show as it could not otherwise be, and that's utterly and fundamentally perverse.

And when I say the staging must be done away with altogether, I mean doing away with both Lepage and his humongous, dead-weight, ill-conceived, Frankenstein contraption to which contraption he's devoted entirely. The ONLY way such a contraption could justify itself is if it were capable of becoming THE ENTIRE STAGE ITSELF, perfectly plastic and malleable, and by so doing become invisible or transparent as a contraption. That's nowhere in the cards with Le Machine, either technically or practically; ergo, it has to go, along with its creator who cares infinitely more for it than for Wagner's great work which work both he and it were supposed to serve.

We watched the entire Met HD film of its production of the François Girard staging of Wagner's Parsifal the other night courtesy of a YouTube bandit — Blessed be he or her! — who posted a digital copy of the Met's HD film to YouTube spread across three HD videos, one for each act (all of which have now been taken down on a just and justified copyright infringement complaint by the Met) and were both surprised and hugely disappointed by the staging. From the very brief snippets we'd seen of that staging previously, all of which gave promise of its being truly splendid, and from all the enthusiastic talk about it on online opera forums, opera blogs, and in much if not all the mainstream media, we suppose we expected far too much. The very best we can say about the staging is that it's not Eurotrash as monsieur Girard at least recognized his responsibility and obligation to Wagner and Parsifal by trying, to the extent of his gift, to realize the full spirit and sense of Wagner's vision and concept rather than impose a vision and concept of his own devising. The resulting staging, however, is, in our not so humble opinion, seriously flawed and in places just out-and-out off the rails, and while not Eurotrash, is badly misguided and largely ineffective. What rescues the production are the sterling music-making and gripping onstage dramatic performances by all involved which music-making and dramatic performances are so strong as to almost convince one the staging is on an equal par — or so we imagine is the reason of this staging's widespread acclaim.

Too bad (for us). We were really looking forward to and had high hopes for this.

Now that (digitally) filmed staged opera performances have become a regular and popular inhabitant of our cultural landscape it's time the one responsible for determining what appears or doesn't appear in a shot — viz., the film's director — recognizes the special requirements of the camera shot syntax peculiar to the successful presentation of filmed staged opera and cease assuming, as filmed staged opera film directors almost always do today, that the camera shot syntax appropriate for works created originally and specifically for film is equally appropriate for the presentation of filmed staged opera. It most decidedly is not. Filmed staged opera requires its own camera shot syntax, and it's one that couldn't be more simple or straightforward.

One of film's most powerful expressive tools, a tool unique to cinema, is the close-up in its various forms — from the extreme close-up that focuses on some minute detail, to the "head(or face)-shot", to the "head-and-shoulders-shot", to the "one-shot" (i.e., half-to-full-length one-person close-up most often referred to as a "medium close-up"), to the "two-shot" (i.e., half-to-full-length two-person close-up, also most often referred to as a "medium close-up"), etc. — and so, quite naturally, the close-up is used with great frequency in works created originally and specifically for film. It might even be called film's workhorse shot.

In the filming of staged opera, however, the close-up should never be used with anywhere near that sort of frequency and in fact ought to be used only with the utmost discretion. Anna Netrebko and Jonas Kaufmann notwithstanding, opera singers, generally speaking, are not meant to be seen up close when working but are most favorably and advantageously viewed when seen at a discreet distance. Ditto certain parts of a production's set or costumes (certain sets and costumes in Julie Taymor's Zauberflöte for the Met spring instantly to mind). Therefore, in filmed staged opera, and barring any special circumstances, the workhorse shot should always be the so-called "medium-shot", unexciting in itself as it may be: a shot that includes all those onstage who are part of the central action at any point in time, or are a dramatically meaningful part of the reaction to that action, close-ups being interjected only when dramatically clarifying or revealing, or interjected only occasionally and fleetingly as visual spice. Further, and contrary to the standard shot-hierarchy of film where the "long-shot" (i.e., the so-called "establishing-shot" that shows the entire overall setting of the action) is used only rarely, typically only at scene's opening, in a filmed staged opera the long-shot should be used fairly often so that the film audience is regularly provided a satisfying overall orientating view; a view available at will at all times for an audience in the opera house.

And excepting special effects, that's pretty much it. That would seem to give short shrift to those benefits film is able to provide an audience; benefits not available to them live in the opera house. But that's not the way filmed staged opera is experienced in practice when done properly where the shot "palette", so to speak, and shot tempo are used with intelligence and real dramatic understanding. Rather, filmed staged opera done in that way is almost invariably experienced as a satisfying simulacrum of the Real Deal. While there no doubt will be those who care little for or are indifferent to opera as genuine dramma per musica and who will object bitterly to being deprived of constant, up-close-and-personal views of their favorite songbirds, there's nothing for it. For such fans one can say only, let 'em eat cake.

We've just finished watching — uncut, unedited, and uninterrupted by commercials, all courtesy of that invaluable cable channel TCM — the 1973 Oscar-winning movie The Sting written by David S. Ward and directed by George Roy Hill starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and even after six or seven previous viewings over the years it remains fresh and a source of unalloyed pleasure. From its intricate, suspenseful, twisty plot, to its brilliantly realized characterizations, to its casting, to its soundtrack (Scott Joplin rags adapted and arranged by the late Marvin Hamlisch), to its costumes, to its cinematography, to its minute attention to detail throughout, it is positively lapidary; a very paragon of the well-made Hollywood movie; an exemplar of the breed.

Since the mid-70s we've visited a movie theater only rarely (only three times, to be more precise) and so ask the question: Does Hollywood make such movies anymore, or have 21st-century movie audiences become too sophisticated and/or lost their taste for such intelligent if unserious fare? We honestly don't know, but judging from what eventually makes it to the TV screen from current-day Hollywood we would guess such movies are today considerably out of fashion and would fail to be appreciated.

If so, too bad. In a world and era fraught with difficulty and danger, such supremely well-made intelligent if unserious fare is just the ticket if only to provide but a few hours of soul-satisfying escape and relief from the prevailing Zeitgeist.

If there exists a finer, more compelling argument for the need, necessity, and value of dedicated (i.e., professional), serious, deeply informed and literate critics and criticism in the arts and literature than the one written for The New Yorker titled "A Critic’s Manifesto" by Daniel Mendelsohn we've never encountered it.

An excerpt:

By dramatizing their own thinking on the page, by revealing the basis of their judgments and letting you glimpse the mechanisms by which they exercised their (individual, personal, quirky) taste, all these [professional] critics were, necessarily, implying that you could arrive at your own, quite different judgments—that a given work could operate on your own sensibility in a different way. What I was really learning from those critics each week was how to think. How to think (we use the term so often that we barely realize what we’re saying) critically — which is to say, how to think like a critic, how to judge things for myself. To think is to make judgments based on knowledge: period.

[...]

And so the fact is that (to invoke the popular saying) everyone is not a critic. This, in the end, may be the crux of the problem, and may help explain the unusual degree of violence in the reaction to the stridently negative reviews that appeared in the Times Book Review earlier this summer, triggering the heated debate about critics. In an essay about phony memoirs that I wrote a few years ago, I argued that great anger expressed against authors and publishers when traditionally published memoirs turn out to be phony was a kind of cultural displacement: what has made us all anxious about truth and accuracy in personal narrative is not so much the published memoirs that turn out to be false or exaggerated, which has often been the case, historically, but rather the unprecedented explosion of personal writing (and inaccuracy and falsehood) online, in Web sites and blogs and anonymous commentary—forums where there are no editors and fact-checkers and publishers to point an accusing finger at.

Similarly, I wonder whether the recent storm of discussion about criticism, the flurry of anxiety and debate about the proper place of positive and negative reviewing in the literary world, isn’t a by-product of the fact that criticism, in a way unimaginable even twenty years ago, has been taken out of the hands of the people who should be practicing it: true critics, people who, on the whole, know precisely how to wield a deadly zinger, and to what uses it is properly put. When, after hearing about them, I first read the reviews of Peck’s and Ohlin’s works, I had to laugh. Even the worst of the disparagements wielded by the reviewers in question paled in comparison to the groundless vituperation and ad hominem abuse you regularly encounter in Amazon.com reviews or the “comments” sections of literary publications. Yes, we’re all a bit sensitive to negative reviewing these days; but if you’re going to sit in judgment on anyone, it shouldn’t be the critics.

For the second time in the space of a month our hiatus from blogging is interrupted by the death of yet another irreplaceable artist whose passing we cannot let go without comment.

Gore Vidal — writer; public intellectual; notorious wit, provocateur, and celebrity figure — died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles from complications of pneumonia reports The New York Times. He was 86.

Mr. Vidal possessed an almost embarrassing abundance of gifts: handsome to the point of beautiful, his cutting acerbic wit and sharpness of intellect were wonders to behold on numerous occasions on television talk shows and on the lecture circuit. As if those weren't gifts sufficient, Mr. Vidal, one of this country's most prolific writers, was perhaps the most elegant writer this country has ever produced, a gift on display in his 25 novels and scads of essays too numerous to count, not to mention several plays and a number of TV dramas and Hollywood movies.

With Mr. Vidal's passing, the world has been deprived of one of its most accomplished artists.

The gifted humorist, essayist, journalist, screenwriter, and filmmaker Nora Ephron died today at age 71 from pneumonia brought on by acute myeloid leukemia according to The New York Times.

We first encountered Ms. Ephron's work in a short humor piece she did for Esquire magazine in the '70s, if our memory can be trusted, titled simply, "Crabs" (we can't seem to locate it online and so can't link to it), which, it struck us at the time, was one of the most perfect pieces of humor we'd ever read. She once said of writing (this a close paraphrase as we can't locate the source of the verbatim quote): "Beginnings and endings are easy. It's the stuff in the middle that's hard." That's no doubt true (as it is of life as well) but one would be hard-pressed to discern that in Ms. Ephron's writing so effortlessly does it all seem to flow whether it be for the page or the screen. The film When Harry Met Sally for which she wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay is a case in point and a sterling example of Ms. Ephron's pitch-perfect, bitingly humorous but deeply sympathetic and insightful commentary on contemporary male-female behavior and interaction, and her short, best-selling, thinly-veiled autobiographical novel Heartburn another case in point and a sterling example of her ability to find humor (if at times of the dark sort) in even the most painful personal experience. Hers is a voice absent which the world will be a poorer and less bright place. She will be sorely missed.

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 4:20 PM Eastern on 26 Nov to make more specific a few vaguely worded generalities.]

This Thanksgiving we felt it meet and very American to view two classic movies from classic Hollywood's golden age; that period in the 1930s just before the beginning of the two-decade forced dismantling of the studio system that had ruled Hollywood almost since its very beginnings: the big-budget swashbuckler, The Adventures Of Robin Hood (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1938); and the humongous-budget epic, Gone With The Wind (Selznick International, 1939), and what a startling comparison the two made.

Unless one shifts one's dramatic and aesthetic senses into indulgent mode, the much celebrated GWTW is almost painful to watch so hokey and hammy is it throughout (well, after the radish at any rate; before that point, it was mostly bearable) — from the too-often vulgarly employed three-strip dye transfer Technicolor photography, to the maudlin script (by Sidney Howard), to the overwrought Hollywood music (by Max Steiner), and to the performances of the actors the stellar and iconic performances of Vivien Leigh (Scarlett O'Hara) and Hattie McDaniel (Mammy) notwithstanding.

Watching TAORH, on the other hand, is an unalloyed joy on all fronts: from the beautiful and beautifully executed three-strip dye transfer Technicolor photography; to the sparkling and literate script (by Norman Reilly Raine and Seton I. Miller); to the lushly Romantic music (by Erich Wolfgang Korngold); and to the performances of all the actors from bit players to stars including a bravura and iconic performance by Errol Flynn who, even to this day and like Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara in GWTW after him, seems the very incarnation of the essence of the movie's central protagonist. This is Hollywood mythmaking at its finest, an exemplar of classic Hollywood moviemaking, and we all ought to be thankful this Thanksgiving season for the miracle of cinema which, unlike, say, theater or opera, preserves intact a dynamic artwork and permits us to see the work at firsthand and in perpetuity as it was intended to be seen, and exactly as it was seen by its very first audiences.

A small thing to be thankful for in the larger worldview, perhaps, but eminently gratifying nevertheless.

While we're a great admirer of aesthetic economy and especially so in matters musical, when it comes to the sort of economy on display in music written by those composers who adhere to the principles of the so-called "Minimalist" movement (or school), not so much. As with most things, however, there are exceptions. One such exception is music written for Halloween — John Carpenter's made-on-a-shoestring ($325,000), 1978 movie Halloween, that is. The music was written by Carpenter himself (who also co-wrote, directed, and co-produced the movie) and is responsible in no small part for the movie's seminally (and today iconic) creepy effect that defined (and spawned) a new genre of slasher horror flick where the visceral horror of gore and blood plays second banana to horror of the psychological sort.

And so, without further ado, we give you for Halloween the title theme from «shudder»Halloween.

Yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of perhaps the greatest of all composers for film, Bernard Herrmann. In our estimation no composer has ever matched his astonishing ability to capture, reinforce, and enrich the emotional essence of whatever scene was playing out on-screen without the music ever calling attention to itself while doing so yet at the same time so impressing itself on one's consciousness that a mere replaying of that music is enough to recall vividly to the mind's eye the images to which it was so intimately wed. Herrmann's brilliant score for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is, of course, the most famous example of this. Here's another. Less famous, perhaps, but hardly less an example.